Animal cruelty: A reply to Dave Martins

Nov 08, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – Guyanese iconic, international singer, Dave Martins, does a weekly column in the Stabroek News. I find his offerings informative. I particularly like reading about his personal history because as a fellow columnist, the urge to let readers know your evolution is always there.
Mr. Martins is older than I am and has interacted with Guyana longer than I have. From reading Mr. Martins, I would say he is far less an emotional critic of his country than I am. Maybe this has to do with our evolution and work. He is a cultural artist. I am an academic who studies the philosophical character of a young post-colonial country and the role power has played in destroying its collective psyche even before Independence.
Mr. Martins’ commentary yesterday is a refreshing and comforting manifestation of a Guyanese who still has his psychic integrity intact. Not many Guyanese possess the capacity to understand the values of compassion, empathy, and humaneness.
Mr. Martins’ piece is on animal cruelty in Guyana. He laments the wanton use of firecrackers. But I think there was one aspect of Mr. Martins’ piece that I was looking for but I didn’t find – the lack of appreciation in the total society, no one component of it, not from one quarter only but the total society on the value of animals to humans.
Mr. Martins has to understand that animal cruelty will continue unabated because we live in a society where the capacity to understand the strands that hold civilisation together is gone. The US Embassy discovered a depraved aberration in Guyana and placed it in the State Department Annual Report on human rights. The embassy reported that drivers do not dim their high beams when you flash to indicate that they must.
The embassy reported on this uncouthness two years ago. Ten years before I had done a Sunday column on people refusing to dim and reproduced that column some years after. It has to be an uncivilised country where a driver is telling you he/she cannot see the road ahead so dim your high beam but that oncoming driver simply ignores you. Have you seen the people who refuse to dim? They are not from low income areas of south Georgetown.
Here is graphic evidence that animal cruelty is not even something this society knows about much less to think about it. For two weeks in 2016, state-employed vets at the Ogle airport were killing puppies that came from the interior because these vets demanded to see papers of origin of birth. So many Guyanese lost their pets because even though they live in Guyana, they couldn’t prove where the dogs were born.
That was ignorance, asininity and stupidity and sadistic animal cruelty. If I live in Region One and I am going to visit my mother in Georgetown for a month why should I know that at Ogle, the vets would ask me where my dog was born? But look at the psychic breakdown of this country. The last person you expect to show eagerness to kill a puppy is a vet. But the vets were doing the killings.
I did five columns on the murder of these dogs after Kaieteur News devoted a large space in one of its Sunday’s edition to this issue. Here is the guide to those columns – January 23, 2021; January 4, 2018; December 16, 2016; December 14, 2016; November 3, 2016.
Only one human in this country responded to what was taking place at the Ogle airport – the then editor-in chief of the Chronicle, Mr. Nigel Williams. He took up the story and published images of the executed puppies.
No one, outside of Mr. Williams and Frederick Kissoon, even penned one paragraph in the newspaper or voice disappointment on social media on what was taking place at Ogle. When vets can indiscriminately kill animals, then such a society is definitely broken down.
It was the killing of the puppies that made up my mind for me that APNU+AFC had to be voted out. Not one leader in the government said even a word about that tragedy. From the APNU leadership, there were no words of condemnation. AFC bigwigs showed absolutely no interest even though Kaieteur News interviewed the miner whose three dogs were almost put to death. It was the only time in our country’s history that philistines were in charge of Guyana. Fortunately, they are out and out forever. The killing of those puppies, I say without fear of contradiction, would not have happened in any other country without governmental intervention. Governments just do not wantonly kill pet dogs like that. But they do in Guyana because civilisation took flight from this place a long time ago.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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